The Quest for Eco Friendly Dish Soap

11 by Becky Striepe on August 2, 2010

Washing Dishes

We ran out of dish soap the other day. Normally, I hit up the local co-op or Whole Foods for some hippie dish soap, but this time none of those places were on my errand list. Rather than drive out of my way, I popped into a run of the mill local grocery story to see what I could find.

What I learned sort of surprised me!

There were three options for "green" dish soap: Palmolive Pure + Clear, Seventh Generation, and Clorox Greenworks. Obviously, some photo-taking and label-reading were in order!

Palmolive Pure + Clear

The first bottle I grabbed was the Palmolive. The packaging was really visually appealing - clear plastic with minimal labeling, probably intended to show how pure and clear the soap inside is. Their label was so minimalist that it didn't list a single ingredient!

Nice try, Palmolive. If you're not confident enough to list what's in the bottle, I'm not confident enough to shell out $2.99.

Clorox Greenworks

Greenworks goes the nature themed route with their packaging, featuring a giant flower on the front and an endorsement from the Sierra Club on the back. They were kind enough to list their ingredients. Check it:

Filtered water, coconut-based cleaning agents (anionic and nonionic surfactants, alkyl polyglucoside, sodium lauryl sulfate, lauramine oxide), corn-based ethanol, fragrance with essential oils, biodegradable preservative, citric acid, blue and yellow colorant

The bottle also declares that it's free of phosphates.

Not so much an ideal ingredient list, but at least they're up front about what's in the bottle.

Seventh Generation

This is my fall back dish soap. Most places carry it, I believe in the brand, and it's not too pricey. For whatever reason, I was feeling curious that day though, so I decided to compare ingredients with Greenworks.

The back of the Seventh Generation bottle gives you a summary of ingredients and talks a bit about what's not in their product. If you want to actually access the ingredients list, you have to peel up the back label to see the hidden label underneath. Weird! Why wouldn't they just find space back there to tell us what's in their product?

So I peeled back the label to reveal their ingredients list:

Aqua (water), sodium lauryl sulfate, lauramine oxide, decyl glucoside and lauryl polyglucose (plant-derived cleaning agents), 1,3 -propanediol (plant-derived foam stabilizer), citric acid (cornstarch-derived water so_ener), sodium chloride (thickener), magnesium chloride (cleaning enhancer), essential oils and botanical extracts* (citrus aurantifolia (lime), lavendula angustifolia (lavender), mentha spicata (spearmint), mentha piperita (peppermint), cananga odorata (ylang ylang)), 2-Methyl-4-isothiazolin-3-one & 1,2-Benzisothiazolin-3-one (MIT/BIT) (preservatives). *d-limonene is a naturally occurring component of these ingredients.

It actually has far more ingredients than the Greenworks variety, and both contain sodium lauryl sulfate. Hmmm....

I'm feeling a little disillusioned with Seventh Generation right now! I ended up going with Greenworks' "free and clear" variety. It was on sale, and I was feeling like it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. What would you guys have done in my situation?

None of these were ideal choices. Maybe it's time to start making my own dish soap? At the very least, I need to research more to find brands I can feel better about. Do you guys have a favorite brand of natural dish soap? What about a recipe for making your own that's worked well? I'd love to hear about your experiences!

Image Credits:
Washing Dishes. Creative Commons photo by jek-a-go-go
All other photos by Becky Striepe

http://www.blugirlart.com Suzanne Meyer Pistorius

Hi Becky
I use Dr Bronners for almost everything, dishes, laundry, hair, body to me its the best and it works
Suzanne

http://glueandglitter.com Becky

Oooh, good one! I love Dr. Bronner’s!

http://chicagoregen.com/ Milton Dixon

I second the Dr. Bronners. It’s strong stuff, though.

Why do we need a separate soap for each individual task?
debbi

I use Method. It is the most environmentally friendly dish soap that I’ve been able to find in regular supermarkets. For the record, I have to be careful with what I use due to Eczema and allergies that cause contact dermatitis. The Method cucumber dish soap did not irritate my very sensitive hands and is great with grease. I have since started using other products from their line.

http://www.methodhome.com/product.aspx?page=553
http://www.discountrecycledofficeproducts.com Alex

fascinating! thanks for the great recommendations on the different brands. i’ll be sure to try them out.
Kip Slaughter

We also use Dr. Bronners, but since it is so concentrated, we mix it with water and keep it in a spray bottle. Usually about 1 part soap to 3 or 4 parts water. This also is much more cost effective and we go through soap much slower than just pouring it strait from the bottle.
Charlie

I use this all purpose soap. It is a make it yourself one…

1 bar IVORY or DOVE or your choice 3.5 oz. bar soap
3 cups boiling water

SHRED bar of hand soap with hand-held shredder. Place in large bowl. Pour boiling water over soap and stir with wooden spoon until soap is dissolved. Let stand until cool. Will thicken as it cools so I add more water when I use it in a dispenser for hand soap. I add one to two tablespoons of ammonia for dish soap, for grease cutting.
http://www.indigoshowers.co.uk steam showers

Dr Bronners is the best!
Lori

I’d recommend Planet or Earth Friendly Products. (Avoid Ecover.) Good luck!
Ryan

I know this is an older post but I stumbled here somehow on my internet search of dish soaps. I found this article; http://www.naturalnews.com/005342.html and decided to do a little research. I’ve been using Palmolive Pure & Clear for a long time now and I switch back and forth between that and Green Works. I never (for some odd reason) trusted Seventh Generation products. I feel as though they are overstated and too much into the “Go Green” hype. I don’t know if it’s the packaging or the advertising stunts they have pulled but something always seemed a little off. They come off like they are #1 in the business as far as who has the “most natural, safe, & economic household products” After tonight, reading my own research and ingredient lists…then coming across this article. (I didn’t even realize that Seventh Generation tries to pull that hidden under the label thing until now….Wow. Bamboozling people is right…) I have decided that most if not all have dangerous and toxic chemicals and they use proper and cautious wording to avoid the confrontation of customers. The preservative Methylisothiazolinone (or MIT) is found in all three dish soaps that you have listed here on this site. It is a very toxic and dangerous chemical. So I don’t know…..perhaps I’ll be switching over to good old Dr. Bronners. I am a little sad and disappointed. Before tonight, I have never been what I would consider to be paranoid about big giant corporations but I had trust in the green movement and thought companies were actually started to look out for the health and safety of their customers. I thought wrong.
celesul

So, my skin is usually a good metric for what is really bad, because it is ultra sensitive. If dish soap isn’t hypoallergenic and environmentally friendly, my skin tends to go red and itchy. Seventh generation may have a lot of ingredients, but it’s one of the mildest dish soaps I’ve found in terms of it’s effect on my hands. Sodium Lauryl Sulfate is what makes something a detergent, which is desirable when one is cleaning dishes, although I find it too harsh for body soap or shampoo. With the exception of Dr. Bronners, a liquid cleaning soap will have SLS or a close relative (some of the relatives are used so that the product doesn’t have SLS officially, but this often results in an even harsher product). The reason the Seventh Generation list is so long is because they are providing you with very complete information. They are giving you chemical names as well as regular names for each item, and instead of telling you “fragrance” they are telling you which fragrances and what chemicals are in each fragrance. It makes good business sense for them to hide their ingredients under the label, because it is so complete that it scares people away (as it did to you).

If you’re looking at mainstream cleaning products (products that function about how you’d expect them to), they’ll use things like SLS. And for that category of product, I do think that Seventh Generation does a good job, as they provide complete information (as someone with sensitivities, I appreciate that they tell me what the fragrances are, and that they are clearly all natural) and are good about being plant derived. If you’re willing to adapt to products that don’t behave like what you are used to, then you can indeed go greener. Mind, while my skin does prefer saponified oils, lye is used to create them, and that stuff is way more dangerous than SLS could ever hope to be!